Venezuela president says ‘desperate’ US behind recent blackout

Caracas and other parts of Venezuela were hit by a massive power cut on Monday, a few months after a similar nationwide blackout, which Maduro blamed on Washington as well.

The Monday blackout was caused by a “high-tech electromagnetic attack,” Maduro said Wednesday while addressing the opening of military exercises.

Sabotage at a hydroelectric plant that provides 80 percent of the country’s power has caused the outage, Maduro suggested, adding that the electricity system has suffered “dozens of attacks” over the last four months.

“The US imperialism is desperate because of its defeats in Venezuela,” Maduro said in the speech carried on radio and television, pinning the blame for the outages on the US government.

The Monday blackout reportedly left chaos on the streets of the capital as traffic lights lost power, and the metro stopped running, forcing many people to walk home from work.

While the government said power has been restored in much of Venezuela on Tuesday, opposition leader Juan Guaido denied that, saying that 16 of the country’s 23 states were still facing at least partial outages.

The blackout came a few months after another major outage in March 2019, which affected at least 18 of 23 Venezuelan states. That blackout was also blamed by Venezuelan authorities on anti-government saboteurs working for the United States.

Fifteen Venezuelan kids with kidney disease reportedly died after being unable to get dialysis during the power outage as President Maduro said at the time a cyber attack prevented authorities from restoring power.